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Summary

This is a report on NHS-funded maternity services in England for November 2016, using data submitted to the Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS). The MSDS has been developed to help achieve better outcomes of care for mothers, babies and children.

The MSDS is a patient-level 'secondary uses' data set that re-uses clinical and operational data for purposes other than direct patient care, such as commissioning, clinical audit. It captures key information at each stage of the maternity service care pathway in NHS-funded maternity services, such as those provided by GP practices and hospitals. The data collected include mother's demographics, booking appointments, admissions and re-admissions, screening tests, labour and delivery along with baby's demographics, diagnoses and screening tests.

As part of this month's publication, we are also publishing an analysis of delivery method by previous births for women having a single baby at term (37 weeks gestation or more) in an interactive spreadsheet.

These statistics are classified as experimental and should be used with caution. Experimental statistics are new official statistics undergoing evaluation. More information about experimental statistics can be found on the UK Statistics Authority website.

Please note that changes to the construction of data quality measures mean that a small number of the validity percentages for one of the measures in the Data Quality report for historic months differ slightly from those shown in previously published Data Quality reports. Please see the note on the front page of the Data Quality report for further details.

Key Facts

This report contains key information based on the submissions that have been made by providers and focuses on data relating to activity that occurred in November 2016.

· 123 providers successfully submitted November 2016 data for the MSDS*. We have worked with providers to increase the number of organisations submitting booking appointment data compared to previous months. This compares with 134 providers submitting data in HES for 2015-16. We continue to work with providers who did not respond and expect coverage to increase further over time.

· 89 of these providers submitted birth data relating to babies born in November 2016. We are also working with providers to increase the number of organisations submitting birth data.

· Among women that had a booking appointment in November 2016, 54 per cent were within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. This varied across regions with the highest proportion (60 per cent) of women having appointments in the first 10 weeks in the North of England Commissioning Region and the lowest proportion (36 per cent) in the London Commissioning Region.

· Of the births that had a recorded delivery method, 59 per cent were spontaneous vaginal births, 11 per cent had instrumental assistance, 12 per cent were elective caesarean sections and 15 per cent were emergency caesarean sections. The proportion of births by emergency caesarean was highest in the London Commissioning Regions (17 per cent) and lowest in the South of England Commissioning Region (14 per cent).

· Among mothers that gave birth at 37 weeks gestation or later, 79 per cent had skin-to-skin contact with their baby within one hour of birth. The percentage of mothers that had skin-to-skin contact within one hour was highest in the Midlands and East of England and the South of England Commissioning Regions (82 per cent) and lowest in the North of England Commissioning Region (75 per cent).

· 73 per cent of babies received maternal or donor breast milk as their first feed.

*The November 2016 MSDS submission for RWY Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust only contained activity relating to earlier reporting periods. Therefore they are included in counts and percentages relating to organisational coverage only within this report.